The present invention relates to printed media production and in particular to a binding assembly for a printer.
Various methods, systems and apparatus relating to the present invention are disclosed in the following co-pending applications filed by the applicant or assignee of the present invention simultaneously with the present application:
The discloses of these co-pending applications are incorporated herein by cross-reference.
With the advent of the Internet has come the opportunity for the print media industry to publish xe2x80x9con-linexe2x80x9d rather than producing and distributing traditional paper based publications. On-line publishing has a number of advantages. From the consumer""s point of view, information is available on demand, information can be navigated via hypertext links, information can be searched, and information can be automatically personalized. From the publisher""s point of view, the costs of printing and physical distribution are eliminated and the publication becomes more attractive to advertisers as it can be targeted to specific demographics and linked to product sites.
On-line publication also has disadvantages. Computer screens are inferior to paper. At the same quality as a magazine page, a SVGA computer screen displays only about a fifth as much information. Both CRT""s (Cathode Ray Tubes) and LCD""s (Liquid Crystal Displays) have brightness and contrast problems, particularly when ambient light is strong. Ink on paper, being reflective rather than emissive is both bright and sharp in ambient light. Accordingly, people have a natural preference to read newspapers, magazines, catalogues, brochures and other publications in a bound paper based format.
Known digital printers, and in particular digital inkjet printers, do not make any provision for binding together the pages of printed media. Such an arrangement would conveniently provide for bound document production in the small office/home office (SOHO) environment. This would also permit some of the existing drawbacks of on-line publication to be addressed. However, in the SOHO environment space is often at a premium. Therefore, any provision for automatically binding separate pages into a bound document must not add a significant amount of extra space over that occupied by the printer.
It is an object of the present invention to provide means to bind pages of printed media into bound documents suitable for use in conjunction with a digital printer. Accordingly, the present invention provides a binding assembly for use with a digital printer having a support frame for mounting a printhead assembly for printing on pages of media, the binding assembly including:
a binding means mounted to the support frame wherein the binding means is adapted to bind the pages along a line substantially perpendicular to the direction of travel of the page with respect to the support frame.
Preferably, the binding means includes a glue sponge strip extending perpendicularly to the general direction of travel of the page with respect to the support frame. In a further preferred form, retractable fingers periodically extend into the paper path for temporarily stopping the page to allow the glue sponge strip to apply a line of adhesive to the page. In some embodiments of this form of the invention, the retractable fingers retract once the glue strip has applied adhesive to the page such that the page is gravity fed to a binding area where each page is sequentially adhered to the previous page. It is further preferred if the retractable fingers retract once the glue strip has applied adhesive to the page such that the page is gravity fed to a binding area where each page is sequentially adhered to the previous page.
It will be appreciated that the binding means according to this embodiment applies the adhesive directly prior to pressing the adhesive against the previous page. This is more effective than applying adhesive to the rear of each page and sequentially pressing each page to the subsequent page because any interruption in the printing process such as replenishing the paper supply may allow the adhesive applied to the last adhered page to deteriorate and become less effective.
In another preferred form, the glue sponge strip is adapted to receive adhesive from an adhesive supply by capillary action. In accordance with particularly preferred embodiments, the glue sponge strip is retained in a chamber adapted to seal the strip in an environment acceptable for maintaining adhesive performance when the strip is not in use. In these embodiments, a camshaft is provided to advance the glue strip through a closable aperture in the chamber into engagement with the surface of a page.
In some embodiments, the binding means includes an alignment means to align each page before it is adhered to the previous page. Preferably, the alignment means is a rotating cam positioned to engage the edge of each page and slide them into alignment.
In a particularly preferred embodiment, the printhead is adapted to print the full width of the page simultaneously.
Rectangular pages of media move through the printer in a xe2x80x9clandscapexe2x80x9d orientation wherein the long side of the page is perpendicular to the direction of page travel. As the pages move from a media storage area, such as the paper tray, to the binding area, the overall distance that each page travels is reduced simply because they are in xe2x80x9clandscapexe2x80x9d orientation as opposed to xe2x80x9cportraitxe2x80x9d orientation. Consequently, a printer that incorporates the binding assembly can have a relatively compact design instead of an elongate design, which may be awkward to accommodate, where space is limited. Notwithstanding the compact design, the present invention still produces documents bound along the long edge of the page such that the document is held and read in the commonly preferred xe2x80x9cportraitxe2x80x9d orientation.
The present invention also allows the production of printed material in the traditionally appealing form of a bound document rather than separate pages. With the aid of modern printers and computer network technology, the invention has many applications in on-line publication of newspapers, magazines, brochures and so on. The present invention will be described with particular reference to the netpage system. An overview of this system is set out below. It has been developed to allow a large number of distributed users to interact with networked information via printed matter and optical sensors thereby to obtain interactive printed matter on demand from high-speed networked color printers.
For this purpose, the Applicant has developed a range of netpage printers. Of these, the wallprinter is designed to be wall mounted in the area where the user would normally first consume the morning news such as in the kitchen or beside the breakfast table. In light of this, it is expected that the wallprinter will be one of the most widely used of the netpage printers and therefore it will be described in detail below to illustrate one specific embodiment of the invention. However, it will be appreciated that this is merely one example of the invention, which may be embodied in many other forms.